Teaching a student to read the English language is one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of the education process. Phonetic teaching has been a major tool for the educator for many years. Students have been taught to memorize the sounds of various combinations of letters in familiar words and then apply those sounds to the same combination in unfamiliar words. This method can quickly frustrate a student when identical combinations have completely different sounds as in the words comb, tomb and bomb, for example.
The use of symbols to represent sounds has been the basis for phonetics in dictionaries for decades. Unfortunately, a word that is spelled phonetically deprives the student of learning the correct spelling and retards his ability to sight read, which is the eventual goal. Improvements in phonetic methods are provided by Clegg, U.S. Pat. No. 4,609,357. The basic problem of phonetic coding is still present, specifically the spelling of the underlying word is lost. All of the phonetic reading methods require the student to learn an auxiliary alphabet in addition to the standard English alphabet. Pictures to represent the basic vowel sounds have been provided by Cytanovich in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,007,548 and 5,057,020. These would be extremely cumbersome for a child to use when decoding an unfamiliar word or for a teacher to apply to written text as a teaching aid.
The clever use of fonts has been presented by Hoffman in U.S. Pat. No. 3,426,451 as a way to distinguish sounds. These suffer many of the same problems common to the art in that a burden would be placed on the student trying to decode a word and to a teacher attempting to apply the code to new words. Replacing the fonts with symbols as advanced by Weiss, U.S. Pat. No. 4,655,713 still does not circumvent the problems of difficulty in use.
A unified system of symbols has been detailed by Al-Kufaishi in U.S. Pat. No. 4,193,212. This symbol set circumvents some of the problems mentioned. The word being taught to the student is spelled correctly with diacritic marks placed on, or in proximity to the letters. The teachings of Al-Kufaishi require the student to learn twenty four new intricate diacritical marks, plus the traditional diacritics, in order to give the twenty six letters of the alphabet the correct pronunciation of his forty seven sounds as found in printed American English. Thus, the system provided by Al-Kufaishi is impractical for the beginning reader.
There has been a long felt need in the art to provide a tool for teaching unfamiliar words while maintaining the correct spelling of the word. Furthermore, there has been a need to provide a tool which does not require the student to learn a large number of symbols and which can be easily added to a written page.